Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I don’t use them. You never know when they’ve been smuggled.”

  “Company man.” I ran my fingers through my hair. Gray hair feels more brittle than brown. I felt a lot of brittle. “What now?”

  He spread the briefcase, tucked the envelope in a pocket, and drew out a bundle wrapped in a paper Marshall Field’s bag. The mattress bounced when he tossed it at the foot. “I had to guess at the sizes: sixteen-and-a-half neck, thirty-four waist, eleven double-E’s.”

  “Ten and a half. My toes won’t mind the extra room. What about a coat?”

  “Listen to the man. I could’ve come with a couple of beefy marshals and marched you out with your bare ass flapping in the breeze.”

  “I figured you’d bill me later.”

  “Consider it recompense. You just became a paid government informant.”

  I shook my head. “Not even for Armani.”

  “Well, put them on. You can always return them.”

  I pulled the bag over and looked inside. I saw plaid. “This how you recruited Jeff Starzek?”

  “There was no haberdashery involved, but the situation was similar. The old patriotic pep talk doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

  I got up, supporting myself on the bed rail, took off the flimsy gown, stood naked while he watched, memorizing scars and moles, broke new underwear out of cellophane, and began the long drawn-out business of dressing. I sat down a couple of times to rest. He didn’t offer to help. The shirt, a black-and-white buffalo plaid, was a little short in the sleeves, but the flannel gave comfortably in the shoulders. The socks were heavy and warm, and the slacks, a sage-green cotton-and-polyester blend, broke just right at the insteps of the stiff new oxfords.

  “Where’s the letter sweater?”

  He said, “They were running an overstock sale on back-to-school. I have to look out for the taxpayers. Hang on a minute.”

  He went out, shutting the door behind him. He was back in less than a minute, pushing a wheelchair. “Hospital regs. We cooperate where we can.”

  My cane hung over the back. He must have parked it outside the room.

  “I haven’t been released.”

  He took a pregnant manila envelope out of his briefcase and dumped it out on the bed. “I took care of the red tape. We invented it, don’t forget.”

  I braced a knee against the bed frame, inspected the cylinder of my .38, stuck it in my hip pocket. I put away my ID folder and opened my wallet. There was a twenty-dollar bill inside. I held it out. “I was down to bare leather when I got back to the motel.”

  “Personal loan. You can’t get back home without gas. I took care of your motel bill, too. You’ll have to make your own arrangements with the hospital. I’m only a poor civil servant. Pay me soon.”

  I put the twenty back in the wallet. “How do I know it’s genuine?”

  “How does anyone? Anyway, there’s not so much Treasury paper floating around as there was last week.”

  He’d heard about the fire.

  “You’re under arrest, Walker. Suspicion of homicide.”

  This was a fresh voice, or as fresh as it got coming out of Lieutenant Kunkel of the Michigan State Police. He stood in the doorway holding a fold of official-looking paper. Trooper Evans stood behind him and a little to the side. His right hand rested on the walnut handle sticking out of his holster.

  Kunkel aimed his face at Clemson. “Who are you?”

  Clemson asked him the same question. General flapping of leather as the two compared ID folders. I sat down on the bed to wait.

  “This man’s in federal custody, Lieutenant. You can have him when we’re through.”

  “Where’s your warrant?”

  The agent put away his folder, took out a long flat wallet, and handed him a folded sheet from the collection inside.

  “This is a John Doe.”

  “For now, so is Mr. Walker. My agency would consider it a favor if you didn’t spread that around outside your division.”

  “What’s Homeland Security got to do with what happened out on the lake?”

  “I can’t discuss that.”

  “Where are you taking him?”

  “I can’t discuss that either.”

  “It’s always the same old shit with the G, isn’t it?”

  “It’s war, Lieutenant. We’re all in it together.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t see you out there bobbing for bodies. I have to call my commander.” He took a step toward the telephone on the bedside table.

  I put my hand on it. “Not on my bill.”

  He stopped, patted his pockets. The trooper drew a cell from a flap pocket and held it out. Kunkel snatched it.

  While he was talking, I looked at Clemson. “The Age of Communication.”

  “I could do with less of it. You can tap a wire. There are just too many voices in the air.”

  “I never got one.”

  “Good God! How do you manage?”

  “I seem to.”

  The lieutenant thrust the cell at Clemson. “My commander wants to talk to you.”

  “What’s his name?” He took it.

  “Her name is Villanueva.”

  The agent began talking. I pointed my chin at Evans. “Did he ever get around to calling you by your name?”

  “Shut up,” said Kunkel, to both of us.

  Clemson held out the cell. “She wants to talk to you again.”

  This conversation was more brief. “Yes, ma’am.” He snapped shut the little telephone and threw it at Evans, who caught it against his chest. “Let’s go, Trooper.”

  “Evans,” I reminded him.

  “Go fuck yourself.” They left.

  “You didn’t even try,” I told Clemson.

  “It would’ve been a waste of diplomacy.”

  “Was it the shaved head?”

  “Partly. We profile everyone, not just the enemy. Here.” He took his coat off the chair and threw it on the bed. “I’m wearing Kevlar under the sweater, so I’m good to ten below. You should, too, and not just because of what happened the other night. Your file reads like Tom Swift at the Alamo.”

  “I’d probably get shot in the head.” I shrugged into the parka, which was Thinsulate and not as heavy as it looked, and let him give me a hand up. I took the cane off the back of the wheelchair and lowered myself into the seat. “Where we headed?”

  “The airport. TSA maintains a room that stands empty most days. It’s a small airport. I’ve reserved it.”

  “Isn’t that where they do strip searches?”

  “Moot point.”

  “You’ve been busy. When did you find time to stroll out by the lake?”

  “I’m a multitasker.” He tapped the telephone holster on his belt. He’d have another one, for a slim semiautomatic, maybe strapped to an ankle. He let his flippant mask slip. “These characters we’re at war with may dress like the Arabian Nights, but they’re hip to technology and they’ve got deep pockets. I don’t want a gun mike picking up everything we say on a driving tour of this picturesque stretch of Americana.”

  “Can I call a lawyer, or is that hopelessly old-fashioned under the Patriot Act?”

  “Call it a free exchange of information. The John Doe’s just to swat flies. When we’re through I’ll drive you back to your car. It’s still parked at the motel.” He pulled my keys out of his pants pocket, shook them, and put them back. “What about the walker?”

  “I’ll come back for it in about ten years.”

  “Walker on a walker. Kind of redundant, at that.” He steered me out into the hall.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Herbert Clemson’s Chrysler was the same oyster color inside and out. When it came to the art of blending in, it stood out a mile.

  There was no cloud cover that day. Sunlight butted in through the windshield, forcing me to unzip my borrowed coat and spread the flaps to keep from sweating. Meanwhile, merchants on both sides of the street bent over snow shovels on the sidewalks in front of their stores
, their breath steaming thick as heavy cream.

  Clemson drove the gray windswept streets a half mile below the limit with both hands on the wheel at nine and three o’clock and signaled all his turns. He had the radio tuned to a call-in talk show, just loud enough to discourage conversation. I was beginning to think he really suspected someone was following him around with surveillance equipment. Obsessive-compulsive disorder seemed to be the black lung of domestic espionage.

  Iglooesque buildings, a squat control tower, and the tailfins of parked planes announced the little airport, fenced in with the usual chain link and razor wire. He parked in a red zone in front of the single terminal, and when security came to tell him to beat it, he flashed his credentials. Evidently the guard had heard from his superiors; he nodded and handed Clemson a permit to put on the dashboard.

  Inside the building I had plenty of time to regret leaving the walker behind. I was unsteady on the cane and needed the agent’s support on the opposite side just to cover the thirty yards to a brown steel fire door with AIRPORT PERSONNEL ONLY stenciled on it in yellow. It belonged to a perfect cube of a room with block walls originally painted a soothing aquamarine, but which time and the combined humidity of naked human bodies had begun to turn the bilious green of old-style public mailboxes and governments on both sides of the Eastern Bloc. Fluorescent tubes shed watered-down lemonade light through ceiling panels onto a folding trestle table and an orange plastic scoop chair, and a rectangular patch of unfaded wall indicated where the standard poster spelling out the rights of detainees had hung until recently. The U.S. Constitution hadn’t been suspended, exactly; just placed out of sight.

  I dropped onto the chair, sloughed off the coat, and sat with my hands folded on the crook of the cane like Clifton Webb. Cigarette burns scalloped the tabletop and the air was layered with nicotine. I hadn’t smoked in days. I concentrated on the throbbing in my leg.

  “Mary Bell Olinas.” Clemson sat on a corner of the table, dangling one foot in its clunky boot. “Folks around here called her Miss Maebelle. A neighbor identified her in the morgue. That hasn’t been released yet. She owned the Sportsmen’s Rest, an old-fashioned motor court outside town. Stop me when I come to something that’s news.”

  I said nothing. He’d put it cleverly, turning my own silence into evidence for the prosecution.

  “She drove a lot of truck for someone who depended on the annual ice-fishing festival to stay off welfare,” he said, “though she wasn’t driving it that night. None of the witnesses saw who was driving well enough to identify him—if it was a man—but a woman her size piloting a snowmobile across two lanes of highway traffic is hard to forget, with or without the shotgun. The truck was registered in her name, bought from a dealership in Flint last November with a cashier’s check for a hundred and fifteen thousand, with the options.”

  “Who was the bankroll?” I asked.

  “So there is something you don’t know.”

  “I’m learning more by the minute.”

  “You’re a liar,” he said cheerfully. “I’m not interested in you, just what you’ve managed to scratch up out of the rosebushes. The room’s not wired.”

  When I made no response, he slid off the table and lifted one end to show me the underside, then set it back down and went up on tiptoe to push a ceiling panel out of its grid. An elaborate network of cobwebs quivered in the stirred air, woolly with dust. It might have been spun since the equipment was installed, but reliable listening devices require frequent maintenance. I was satisfied. He lowered the panel. “Get up and I’ll turn over your chair.”

  I stayed put. “I’m tired enough to take your word for it.”

  He sat back down, swinging his leg. “We just started on the cashier’s check. If they did it right—and they haven’t done much wrong since the beginning—they laundered the money through enough corporations, legitimate and dummies, to implicate half the New York Stock Exchange. But we’ll sniff out the source; the CPAs we’ve got on staff make the team that broke Al Capone look like Remedial Math. In eighteen months we’ll have enough to prosecute. But I’m going to break this terrorist cell wide open before then.”

  “Still convinced it’s terrorists?”

  “It’s too well-funded and organized for anyone else. The federal racketeering laws have the mob on the run, and the independents don’t partner up; they’re jobbers, nothing higher. We’ve known for some time the radical fundamentalists have been expanding their money-raising activities beyond Muslim church groups. Chaldeans are Christian Arabs; most of those who live in suburban Detroit have little sympathy for Islamists. But there’s a lot of bad feeling in this country toward Arabs in general since nine-one-one, and Homeland Security and the Justice Department don’t have the best track record when it comes to sorting them out. Mistakes were made. Toes were stepped on, and they limped over to the other side. Disgruntled Christians with Middle Eastern ties have opened the doors to other charities. Not so much the traditional sects, but in this country anyone with a philosophy and a gift for gab can start his own church. You’d be surprised how many of those there are just here on the east shore.”

  I had the idea that if I asked, he’d have the number handy. “The Church of the Freshwater Sea,” I said.

  He nodded with a tight smile, the professor pleased with his student’s performance. “Terrorists make mistakes too. Paul Starzek was fanatic enough to offer his church for their printing plant, but unstable enough to forget himself and use stolen Treasury stock to print some of his flyers. The one you gave me is the only one of those we’ve found so far. I doubt there are many others. He probably stopped after one sheet.”

  “Someone stopped him.”

  “That was mop-up. I told you these people have brains. They fix their mistakes. They’d put him in the position of caretaker, and that was just a little bit outside his aptitude. Probably they put a tap on his phone after I interviewed him about his brother. When you called asking more or less the same questions, they decided that was too much interest and took him out of the rotation. FBI medical examiners dug a jacketed nine out of the base of his brain, assassin’s work. That makes you indirectly responsible for his death, but I wouldn’t let it affect my appetite. He sold them the use of his hall. If they told him where the money came from or where it was going, it didn’t change his mind.”

  “He had a thing for martyrs. Look at the saint he picked out.”

  “I was raised atheist myself. Anyway they moved fast, figuring you or me or someone else would come poking around. The woodpile was handy, so they stuck him under it and fetched the truck and moved the merchandise out of the church. I hear Miss Maebelle wasn’t any too pleased with the government in the state capital. People have turned their coats for less than that. What I can’t figure out is how you traced the shipment here.”

  “That twenty you gave me doesn’t buy detective lessons.”

  “No good. Not even clever. I’m not Lieutenant Kunkel. I print John Doe warrants the way these characters print twenties. Your friends won’t know when to visit you, because as far as the paperwork goes, you won’t exist.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to put on the brass knuckles. The suspense was getting to me.”

  He smiled his disarming smile. He was good cop, bad cop all in one package. “I shouldn’t have to. You’ve worked for lawyers, so you’re a sometime officer of the court. You, me, the military, and the cop on the beat are all part of the first line of defense. If that doesn’t work for you, don’t forget you didn’t stop being a citizen when they gave you that plastic badge. Just being born here comes with responsibilities.”

  I grinned. “Does that one work anymore?”

  “Almost never. Too many Watergates. Too many White House sex scandals. Too many lies. Too many microwaves and plasma TVs and Game Boys and SUVs. Too many people watching cable, and all divided into tribes. What we need to bring them all together is an Attila the Hun. What we’ve got is the Constitution. So I threaten peop
le and give pep talks. Anyway, I just gave you a lot more than I’d give my congressman, whoever the hell he may be, because you won’t turn back and because of the week you’ve had. Free exchange, remember?”

  “You should’ve said that first.”

  “I make mistakes. We all do. Every one of us was doing something else when the roof fell in. It’s all on-the-job training. What tipped you to the Sportsmen’s Rest?”

  “Dumb blind luck.”

  “You’re not dumb, you’re not blind, and you’re sure not lucky. Start again.”

  I straightened my leg. “Actually, I was snowblind. If I weren’t the other things I wouldn’t be here on several counts. I was working a reverse trace up the shoreline, looking for the place Jeff Starzek stopped last on his way down. There are hundreds of motels and comfort stations on his route, so it was hit-and-miss and hunchwork. A white squall blew me off the highway, that was the luck part. The rest was detective work like I said. Miss Maebelle lied about Cabin Twelve being out of service to keep me from snooping around it. If she lied half as well as she handled a snowmobile and shotgun, I might have moved on. Except she had one of Paul Starzek’s church circulars in her tourist rack.”

  “Where is it?”

  “If it wasn’t with my clothes—”

  “It wasn’t. I went through the rags.”

  “Then I lost it crawling around under Cabin Twelve. It wasn’t government paper.”

  I told him all of it then, from Miss Maebelle trying to pin the tail on the donkey with her scattergun through the black comedy out on the lake. The details weren’t worth holding onto. His interest in manslaughter only ran toward terrorists on the dealing end, and if he wanted to shut me away he had a Christmas list of charges under the Patriot Act. He listened without expression. The only sign he was paying me more than polite attention was his leg had stopped swinging.

  “I still don’t like the element of chance,” he said when I’d finished. “Every setup has at least one of those; legitimate information almost none.”

  “That was just a break. There’s a truck stop called the Air Horn a couple of miles north on the state highway. I’d have stopped there to ask about Jeff, and found out what I did. Then I’d have checked out all the local motels, including the Sportsmen’s. The barkeep, who says he owns the place, recognized him from his picture. He cooled his heels playing the piano there Christmas Eve.”